In Boston- act-ma] Tue Dec 27 Protest Zionist-run Menorah Lighting in Copley Square 5pm

act-ma] Tue Dec 27 Protest Zionist-run Menorah Lighting in Copley Square 5pm

 

12/26/2016 2:36 PM

David Rolde

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Protest Against Zionist-organized Menorah Lighting in Copley Square
Tuesday Dec 27, 5pm - 6:30
https://www.facebook.com/events/731001303723507/

Please join the Boston Hands Off Syria Coalition to protest against this offensive Zionist menorah lighting. We will be holding Palestinian and Syrian flags and handing out literature. The menorah lighting is scheduled for 5:30-6:30. We will try to get there a little early.

Zionists have organized a so-called "Grand Lighting of the Boston Menorah" that will happen on Tuesday Dec 27 in Copley Square. See http://www.bostonchabad.org/chanukah/ Yehuda Yaakov, the so-called "Consul General of Israel to New England" will be there, i.e., the so-called "Israeli government" is participating in this event. The Zionist organizers advertize that Boston mayor Marty Walsh will be there, and Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker will be there. Earlier this month Charlie Baker traveled to Jerusalem where he met with Zionist regime dictator Bibi Netanyahu. See http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/12/gov_charlie_baker_meets_israel.html City Councilor Josh Zakim will be at the menorah lighting. Josh Zakim is the son of notori ous Zionist former ADL-president Leonard Zakim. Josh Zakim led a delegation of Massachusetts state reps and city councilors on a JCRC-sponsored trip to the Zionist "state" in Palestine. See https://www.jcrcboston.org/jcrc-of-greater-boston-to-lead-study-tour-of-israel/

Earlier this month many Massachusetts police officials and officers went to Zionist-occupied Palestine and Syria to learn repressive militarized police tactics that the Zionist regime uses against Palestinians. The so-called "Anti-Defamation League" (ADL) sponsored this trip. ADL claims to be a human rights org but is really a racist Zionist hate group. Cops from Arlington, Boston, Middletown, Mansfield, Massachusetts State Police, MBTA, MIT, Northeastern University and Suffo lk University police departments, along with the Norfolk County Sheriff’s Office, Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, the FBI Boston Division and Homeland Security went on this training trip. MA governor Charlie Baker was there too. This article from the Arlington Patch has a picture of Arlington MA Police Chief Frederick Ryan and Boston Police Commissioner William Evans with the caption "at the border of Israel and Syria while taking part in a training mission in Israel." The only place where Syria and so-called "Israel" border is in the Zionist-occupied Golan Heights. Part of this Zionist police training took place on land that the Zionists stole from Syria in 1967. See http://patch.com/massachusetts/arlington/arlington-police-chief-participates-counterterrorism-seminar-israel

This Zionist menorah lighting is very offensive. It is offensive that political leaders in Boston are collaborating with the Zionist regime which occupies Palestine, denies human rights to Palestinians in Palestine, and denies the right of return from Palestinians who have been forced from their land. The Zionist regime also influences the U.S. to go to war against countries in the region such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and potentially Iran. And the Zionist regime is training our police to violate our civil rights and brutally repress people right here in Massachusetts.

The Zionist regime occupies part of Syria (the Golan heights) and has bombed Syria many times. Both the Zionist regime and the U.S. materially support and direct Al Qaeda terrorists who have invaded Syria. Zionists have long planned to take over or destroy Syria, or split Syria apart, because of Syrian opposition to Zionism, Syrian support for the Palestinian cause, and Syria's secular pluralistic progressive anti-imperialist government and society.

The Zionist menorah lighting is also offensive to Anti-Zionist Jews. The Zionist regime claims to represent all Jews. Zionists offensively mis-use Jewish holidays to support racist genocidal occupation, colonization and war.

Join Boston Hands Off Syria Coalition to demand:
Free Palestine! From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free!
Zionists Out of the Syrian Golan Heights!
Stop the Zionist Imperialist "Regime Change" War on Syria! U.S and Zionists Must Stop Arming Funding and Supporting Takfiri Terrorists Invading Syria! Long Live the Syrian Arab Republic!
No War on Iran! No War on Russia!
Stop Zionist RegimeTraining of Massachusetts Police!
Black Lives Matter! Palestinian Lives Matter! Syrian Lives Matter!

------------------------------------
Boston Hands Off Syria Coalition Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BostonHandsOffSyriaCoalition/
International Hands Off Syria Coalition website with points of unity statement at http://www.handsoffsyriacoalition.net/
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From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of  ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

*****In The Beginning Was... The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

 

Who knows how it happened, how the jug bug craze got started in the folk minute of the 1960s, maybe it happened just like in the 1920s and early 1930s when “jug” got a boost by the likes of the Memphis Jug Band, The Mississippi Sheiks, and about twelve other state-named Sheik groupings using home-made weapons, uh, instruments, picked up from here and there, a jug here, a triangle there, fashion a kazoo of wood or grab a metal one at Woolworth's 5&10 there (got you on that one folkies, right, but they along with Sears & Roebuck's catalogue and maybe Marshall Fields' too sold all manner of musical instruments and before the folk boom of the 1960s when with disposable income [read: allowances and parents of means ready to indulge a few fantasies through their kids] which allowed kids to buy instruments from music stores a lot of guys, guys like Hobart Smith, Homer Jones and Matthew Arnold got their instruments handed down to them or some desperate mother or father like Guy Davis,' Son House's, Cliff Mathers', and Slim Parsons' ordered straight from the catalogue not the finest instruments but those guys spoke highly of their first store-bought instruments even when they could afford better when they made their marks), pluck a worn out grandmother's washtub there and come up with some pretty interesting sounds. Yeah, once you listen to the old stuff on YouTube these days where the Memphis Jug Band has a whole video file devoted to their stuff, same with a lot of the others, you could see where that period might have been the start of the big first wave.

Maybe though back in the 1960s somebody, a few musicians, got together and figured here was something that folk-crazed kids, a very specific demographic not to be confused with all of the generation of ’68 post-war baby boomers coming of age rock and roll jail break-out but those who were sick unto death of the vanilla rock and roll that was being passed out about 1960 or so, get this, music that more than one mother, including my mother, thought was “nice” and that was the kiss of death to that kind of music after the death of classic Elvis/Chuck/Bo/Jerry Lee rock for a while before the Brits came over the pond to stir things up and the West Coast acid-eaters ate enough of the drug to sink the Golden Gate Bridge or at least the park and headed east in the Second Coming of rock and roll (not to be confused with the Christian second coming which would signify the end of the world as we know it or with Yeats' mystical version with the seven-headed dragon staring you in the face so stay away from those who want to travel that route) so they started tinkering. Maybe, and remember the folk milieu perhaps more widely that the rock milieu was very literate, was very into knowing about roots and genesis and where things fit in (including where they, the folkies who also a vision about a kinder, gentler world all mixed in until heads got busted in goddam Mississippi goddam, got their heads busted on Fifth Avenue in NYC for calling for an armed truce to the Vietnam War, got their heads busted come May Day 1971 when all the evil spirits in the world rose to bust a certain kind of dream) somebody in the quickly forming and changing bands looked up some songs in the album archives at the library, or, more likely from what later anecdotal evidence had to say about the matter, found some gem in some record store, maybe a store like Sandy’s over between Harvard and Central Squares in Cambridge who had all kinds of eclectic stuff if you had the time and wherewithal to shuffle through the bins. Institutions like Sandy's and a lot of towns had such oases even some unknown name ones like Larry's in Portland, Maine and Sukie's out in Eire, Pennsylvania if you can believe that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and the Village in the East you could find some gems if you searched long enough and maybe found some old moth-eaten three volume set Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and came up with The Memphis Jug Band and K.C. Moan or the Sheiks doing Rent Man Blues, maybe Furry Lewis on Kassie Jones (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something second hand by Miss Patti Page singing about Cape Cod Bay all moony for the parents or try to hustle our young emotions but traipsing a dog in front of us, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing about sixteen tons, tons of coal and breaking your back too, or good god, some country bumpkin George Jones thing like I couldn't even give you a title for stared you in the face).

From there they, the jug masters of the revival, found the Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, could be the way to prosper by going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, since that was what allowed the jug bands to prosper in the commercial markets of those days, keep the melody so simple that every working stiff and every forlorn housewife had the tune coming out of the sides of their brains and that was that. See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand they had on their fetid bodies. Let’s make it simple, something that was not death-smeared we-are- going-to-die-tomorrow if the Ruskkies go over the top red scare bomb shelter Cold War night that we were trying to shake and take our chances, stake our lives that there was something better to do that wait for the foreordained end.

And that wide awake search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence I have held from those who came of age with me in that time after having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music, since those who were left behind or decided out of ennui or sloth to stay put kept up the old country British Isles Child ballad stuff (their own spin on the stuff not Child’s Brattle Street Brahmin rarified collection stuff) and found some grizzled old geezers like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, Homer Jones, Reverend Jack Robinson and the like, who had made small names for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , the most famous and long-lasting of the 1960s jug groupings, all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, say they were well-versed, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin, smooth Cole Porter and the saucy Gershwin Brothers got a hearing from them and if they could simple those damn complicated Tin Pan Alley melodies they took a shot at those as well), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound but maybe some down in the cellar grandpa jug from the old days of Ball jars and crockery, a found washtub grandma used to use before she got that electric washer from the old garage where she put it against a rainy day when she might have to use it again when hard times came again as they usually did, a washboard found  in that same location, a triangle from somewhere, a kazoo from the music store, some fiddle, a guitar, throw in  a tambourine for Maria and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area within the sound of the bay.

And for a while the band did conquer, picking up other stuff chimes, more exotic kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even up-graded guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Made some stuff up as they went along, or better, made old stuff their own like Washington At Valley Forge, Bumble Bee, Sweet Sue from Paul Whitman and plenty of on the edge Scotty Fitzgerald Jazz Age stuff that got people moving and forgetting their blues. Here is the beauty of it unlike most of the 1920s first wave stuff which was confined to records and radio listening, a lot of the rarer stuff now long gone lost, you can see the Kweskin Jug Band back in the day on YouTube and see the kind of energy which they produced when they were in high form (music that they, Jim and Geoff anyway, still give high energy to when they occasionally appear together in places like Club Passim in Harvard Square these days). Yeah, in the beginning was the jug… 

Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

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An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now!

An Idea Whose Time Has Come-Divest From The Pentagon-Now! 

Frank Jackman comment:

 

As I pointed out in the headline the idea of “divesting” from the deadweight of the Pentagon overlay on society’s resources is the beginning of wisdom. Hell, a nice idea until you figure out that the military-industrial complex that old-time President Eisenhower, a recipient of much military largess in his time, railed against is degrees of magnitude far greater than the “skimpy” role it played in society in his day. For leftist militants, for anti-imperialist fighters, heck, for just rational people the real beginning of wisdom is to not to “tweak” this or that aspect of the complex but to smash it, smash it utterly. There is no other way so when you thing about this slogan-think about what is behind it. The task. Think too that you will be about being a slayer of some very big monster-and there will be blowback. For now that is enough said.

A View From The Left -For a Class-Struggle Fight for Black Freedom

Workers Vanguard No. 1102	16 December 2016

For a Class-Struggle Fight for Black Freedom

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The following speech, edited for publication, was delivered by Spartacist League spokesman Alan Wilde at the Partisan Defense Committee’s 31st annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York City on December 2.

The Russian writer Dostoyevsky once wrote: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” By that measure, this is a brutal country run by a barbaric ruling class, whose overflowing prisons are medieval torture chambers. America, whose rulers lecture the world about democracy and human rights, locks up more than two million people in its dungeons—almost a quarter of the world’s prison population. It still has, and uses, the death penalty, which is a legacy of slavery: the lynch rope made legal. Black men and women make up about 40 percent of those in prison and more than 40 percent of those on death row. This is capitalist America, and to think that capitalist America could be otherwise is like thinking that a leopard can change its spots.

And now we have Donald J. Trump. This is bad news. But a victory for Madame Strangelove, a/k/a Hillary Clinton, would not have been good news. We know that a Trump administration will be nasty (to use his word), and we know that fascist and fascistic types certainly feel the wind in their sails. We’ve all heard about the swastikas that have been painted, the Muslim women who’ve had their scarves pulled off, the black people and Latinos who are being harassed on the streets.

But the anger against Trump must not be channeled into schemes to “reclaim” the capitalist Democratic Party. Otherwise, the working people, black people, Latinos, immigrants and others at the bottom of this society will remain trapped in American capitalist democracy, which is really nothing but the dictatorship of the capitalist class. As Marxists, we oppose any political support to any capitalist party. So, no, Trump is not our president. But neither is Obama. Trump’s victory didn’t come from nowhere. His road to the White House was paved by the Democrats.

Under eight years of Obama, here’s what you got: the banks and auto bosses are saved; working people lose their homes, jobs and unions. Today, more than half of working Americans make less than $30,000 a year. Trump threatens to deport, and I am sure he will, but Obama has deported more immigrants than any president in American history. Obama has locked up whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Cops gun down black men and women in the streets with impunity. “How to get away with murder: become a cop”—that was a sign at Wednesday’s protest in Charlotte after it was announced that the cop who killed Keith Lamont Scott would not face charges.

Abroad, Obama’s so-called humanitarian interventions include the overthrow and murder of Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 (something for which Hillary Clinton can also claim a lot of credit). It includes the bombardment of Iraq, of Syria, of Afghanistan, and relentless drone strikes. Under his watch, U.S. special ops are now in 133 countries—in other words, 70 percent of the globe.

You can be sure that the U.S. wants to overthrow the Cuban Revolution, restore capitalism and re-enslave the island. We all know that last week, Fidel Castro, a massive historic figure of the late 20th century, died. He did survive the United States’ numerous assassination attempts against him, dying in his bed at the age of 90. The revolution he led resulted in enormous gains for the masses of the island, especially black people and women. As Trotskyists, we have always stood for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state, just as we do for the other remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos.

But we also stand in political opposition to these countries’ Stalinist bureaucratic misrulers—they push nationalism, the myth of peaceful coexistence with imperialism and actually oppose international extension of revolution. Their policies go against what’s necessary to defend the workers states. And that includes the Castro regime. As part of our defense of the Cuban Revolution, we also fight for a workers political revolution to get rid of the Stalinist bureaucracy and to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

Back to the U.S. With Clinton and the Democrats promising more of the same as the last eight years, is it any wonder that many black and working people just stayed home on Election Day, while others, including many white workers, drank the Trump Kool-Aid? What about people like Bernie Sanders, the supposed progressive, who promised all these wonderful goodies and was supported by groups like Socialist Alternative? Just as he promised, he backed Hillary Clinton and dumped his own supporters like a hot potato. Here’s the bottom line we want to convey to people, to activists, to workers: you don’t get reforms from the ruling class by electing nice-sounding candidates. Benefits for working people and the oppressed are not won through the ballot box. They are forced out of the hands of the capitalist rulers through massive class and social struggles on the picket lines and in the streets. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

But there is a lack of class struggle, to put it mildly, in the U.S. today. The capitalist rulers have been waging relentless war against working people. And the response of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy? Vote for Democrats. Trump said he wants to “save American jobs.” This is just an echo of the same losing and poisonous protectionism that the union tops have long promoted. How did a predatory capitalist once best known for the phrase, “you’re fired,” become the supposed savior of a layer of white workers? You can give a lot of thanks to the union bureaucracy for that. They oversaw the devastation of the unions. In the 1950s, 35 percent of all workers were unionized; today, it’s just over 11 percent. By the way, that 11 percent includes the cops and prison guards that the union tops treacherously organize. These aren’t workers; they are enforcers of capitalist rule. Cops and prison guards have no place in the labor movement.

Slavery and the near extermination of the Native population are at the heart of the founding of American capitalism. The ruling class has nothing but contempt for Native Americans: just look at the vicious repression against the Standing Rock protesters. One young woman now faces the prospect of losing her arm after she was hit with a police concussion grenade. We are Marxists; we are not environmentalists. We don’t oppose pipelines per se, and we don’t have a position on whether that particular pipeline should be built. But we do vigorously defend the Standing Rock protesters and say: Hands off! American Indians have been the victims of rape, pillage and plunder, land theft and broken treaties. Only working-class rule can ensure their social emancipation: voluntary integration on the basis of full equality and regional autonomy for those who want it.

The bedrock of American capitalism is black oppression, with the majority of black people forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. One of the big lies the ruling class sells white working people is that they pay for the benefits that are perceived as going to black people or other minorities. But when anti-racist activists talk about “white skin privilege,” they accept, whether they know it or not, that white workers have no material interest in fighting for black freedom. There is actually a layer of white people that does benefit from black oppression. It’s called the ruling class, the white ruling class, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank because they’ve got the people they exploit and oppress at each other’s throats. If you think all white people—especially white workers—benefit from black oppression, this is not only false; it alibies the racist ruling class. Racial oppression is used to divide the working class and deepen the exploitation of all workers.

Many activists have taken a very courageous stance against rampant police terror. But the cops keep on killing because it is their job under capitalism to terrorize the ghettos and barrios and to smash workers struggles. The only way out is a class perspective; the only way out is the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. Neither liberalism nor black separatism challenges capitalism. There can be no road to black freedom separate from integrated class struggle. Ours is the program of revolutionary integration: mobilizing the proletariat against every manifestation of black oppression to open the road to black equality by building a socialist society. This is part of the struggle to liberate the whole working class from exploitation. Karl Marx captured the great truth of America when he said about this country: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Today, after Trump’s victory, many Democrats talk of compromise. Speaking of the new orange overlord, Obama said: “We’re actually all on one team.” And they are. Compromise works for them because—whatever their differences—Democrats and Republicans, as well as Greens, all represent the same capitalist system. But for the working class, there is no basis for compromise, there is no common ground with them. Compromise didn’t end slavery. Compromise maintained slavery. It took a Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to end slavery. And it will take a third American revolution, a socialist revolution, to end wage slavery and black oppression. I think I can make a pledge, which is that when a victorious multiracial workers army marches through Louisiana, Angola prison will be evacuated, and that symbol of slavery and oppression taken down off the face of the earth.

It is utopian to think that this blood-drenched system can be reformed to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. What is needed is a fighting labor movement that understands that the bosses and workers have no common interests. What’s needed is a revolutionary, multiracial, internationalist workers party that champions women’s rights, including free abortion on demand; that fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants; that makes central to its cause the struggle for black freedom; and that wins working people to opposing the ravages of this ruling class abroad and to standing in solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism—a workers party dedicated to a working-class revolution that sweeps away capitalist rule. Only then will the wealth of this country be used to benefit those who produce it.

Our model is the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917. Our goal is an internationally planned socialist economy. And our vision is a global, classless, stateless communist society of freedom and material abundance. The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, is committed to building the workers party that will, without compromise, fight for a workers government where those who labor rule. We urge you to join our struggle.

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming (expected in the Winter, 2016) . A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (as we did this past December for her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

 
  

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind

****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind   

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea  were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”         

 

Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)      

 

All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.

 

The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.

 

In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.

 

While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.